Here's the announcement for the 2012 incarnation of Penn Bowl, to be held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on 1/28/12.

There are a few changes this year. First, I, Eric Mukherjee, will be formally head-editing, and will be assisted by Saajid Moyen, Patrick Liao, and James Lasker, among others. Secondly, this tournament is submission-optional. We will be soliciting outside packets from teams with a known track record of good writing and editing irrespective of those teams' playing skill, and if you are not solicited you are encouraged to submit. If you would like to write a packet, you will receive our thanks and a -25$ discount. Please contact InfiniteStryker0 [AT] gmail [DOT] com if you would like to write a packet. If you do not get in contact with us by December 1st, we are assuming that you are not writing a packet and we will not use your packet.

We are aiming for 15 packets total, of regular difficulty (around MOO or MAGNI). Tossups will be 8 lines or less.

Any high school teams or teams with fewer than 3 players can e-mail me to arrange for further discounts. Any checks should be made out to "Eric Mukherjee" if possible. If personal checks are an issue, checks can be made out to "Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania".

Mirrors:I am seeking mirrors in all regions as long as there wouldn't be significant field overlap with the main site at Penn. The mirror fee will be $35 per non-house team. Mirror hosts can submit packets to lower this fee but are not required to. All interested hosts should e-mail InfiniteStryker0 [AT] gmail [DOT] com (NOT padt@dolphin.upenn.edu as in the past--we have no way of seeing this if you send it here) to submit a bid.

I'm annoyed that this was announced like a couple months before its date! This isn't about packet writing, but rather a general grousing about the fact that teams need some advance time to organize their schedules.

FYI, our Megabus arrives at 30th street station at 8:30 - we'll hustle to get there as soon as possible, but if things get stuck on 17 teams a first round bye for us might be appreciated. Various luminaries have my phone number if that becomes necessary

The main site of Penn Bowl 2012 was a disgrace in all sorts of ways. This tournament was poorly-staffed, poorly-run and poorly-written, and I’m actually embarrassed for Penn that they put on that event, significantly setting back a reputation which seemed to be building towards a more stable, competent team.

This tournament had wildly fluctating difficulty (at a baseline significantly above "regular"), several definitional or extremely-famous first line clues (resulting in multipleactual three-way buzzer races in the finals), several uber-long tossups despite the claim that there’d be a line cap, and a general contempt for the (slow) moderators via a thorough sprinkling of grammatical wonkiness.

Perhaps this is because this tournament wasn't written when we got to Penn. By the time we were ready to start at 9:45, the moderating staff had two packets to read. Approximately every round or so, a flash drive would go around with a newly-completed packet, as the most competent moderators at the site literally wrote the tournament as it went along. To some extent, the moderator corps did as well as it could without Eric, Saajid, and Patrick, and for that I commend them, but that meant nine prelim rounds lasted until just after 6 PM. I mean, this whole "fuck it, i'm finishing this tournament before the tournament" thing has happened before, but I find it disappointing that I had to live through it when Penn had two and a half months to produce all the questions it needed, or get all the help it needed, and somehow that didn’t happen.

I find it thoroughly and completely inexcusable that this tournament had one fewer packet than it needed. Eric, Saajid, and Patrick stopped writing the set and began to moderate after round 9 as the playoffs began, saying "The set is done" as their justification for doing so. We later learned, GOING INTO THE FINALS, that there was only one finals packet available - with UVA having the advantage, they would win if they won the game played on Finals 1, and we would TIE and end the tournament right there with no other option if we won. Thankfully, UVA won, forestalling a tied tournament... I seriously floated the possibility of a partial refund, and I'm still not sure it's a bad idea. If you do not have enough packets to decide the champion of a tournament, it is compeletely fucking INEXCUSABLE for you to just go full steam ahead and run the tournament anyway. There are several things that could have happened here – the playoffs could have been reduced to two crossover games rather than three. That, or Penn could have fucking gotten the number of packets you need to decide the goddamn tournament. Or Penn could have canceled or rescheduled the tournament until such a time as a real full set could be possibly run -- not ideal, but an option nonetheless!!

I am not interested in hearing any excuses for the problems with this tournament. I am more interested in ensuring that the learning process of the newer members of Penn's team – an ostensible reason for the sheer quantity of editors’ packets – is carried to completion. It's clear that this tournament took on so many editors' packets in part to teach a new cadre of supporting players (Saajid, Patrick, James, etc.) how to write and edit pyramidal questions of reasonable difficulty. Insofar as the set came out as an amorphous blob of difficulties with rampant grammatical errors and no editorial structure, it fails at this goal in its current state. Though Quizbowl isn’t the Roman Republic or Warring States-era Japan; I take it the Penn team won't be falling on their swords any time soon, and there’s no reason for them to do so, it's important to earnestly acknowledge that this tournament does not reflect the kind of product that would adequately teach first-time editors what to produce.

I’m of this opinion, Penn: You have three weeks to revise - no, dissect and completely reconstruct - a good tournament out of this pile of sentences. I really do believe you guys are capable of doing this and turning the current tournament into not just a good event, but a fantastic one.

I eagerly await the establishment of a Penn Bowl subforum so I can do my part to help Penn in its reconstruction of the set over the next three weeks, by pointing out where I thought things went wrong and offering suggestions for improving the questions. I would advise that anyone signed up for future mirrors at Northwestern, WKU, and the like should look out for word from Eric that such a reconstruction has taken place, guaranteeing a reasonable set of consistent difficulty and consistent pyramidality for use elsewhere.

A NECESSARY POSTSCRIPT: The fact that tournament-playing members of Penn’s quizbowl team even considered writing questions for Penn Bowl Trash while the real tournament had gaping Swiss cheese-sized holes in it is utterly inexcusable on all levels, and everyone who actually went ahead and did so should apologize publicly for their dereliction of duty.

I take full responsibility for your (and everyone else's) terrible experience. We didn't have 13 packets because we decided to moderate. We had 13 packets because we were physically unable to write or edit any more questions without wanting to kill ourselves.

Matt wrote:A NECESSARY POSTSCRIPT: The fact that tournament-playing members of Penn’s quizbowl team even considered writing questions for Penn Bowl Trash while the real tournament had gaping Swiss cheese-sized holes in it is utterly inexcusable on all levels, and everyone who actually went ahead and did so should apologize publicly for their dereliction of duty.

Huh? This didn't happen. At all. Ben and Joe are the only people working on Penn Bowl Trash, and they neither play tournaments nor helped with Penn Bowl in any way.

My thanks to Penn for hosting this, and to Eric for head-editing this.

However, I do have significant complains against this set, which I'll bring up in a discussion sub-forum, once one is established.

I am thankful that Penn Bowl exists. It is wonderful to have a meeting between the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic fields midway through the year, on a difficulty below Nationals. And I'm grateful for the hard work Eric has put in over the years to keep this institution alive. However, if this year's tournament is evidence of the kind of work Penn produces, I don't think they should continue to try to edit a tournament by themselves, without outside assistance. This is not an insult. The majority of teams do not have good enough writer/editors in all categories to produce a genuinely good tournament by themselves. Every year I hear promises that Penn is going to be trained into some kind of great writing team; every year the results disprove this claim.

I hope Penn Bowl happens again next year. But I also hope a competent editing team is assembled that can produce a tournament that befits the field that it draws, since the consistently bad strength-of-field to quality-of-questions ratio (along with the ever-troubled logistics) remains a hallmark of this tournament.

John LawrenceYale University '12King's College London '13University of Chicago '19

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” - G.K. Chesterton

Not to pile on or anything, but there were some significant problems with this tournament, some of which are a little different from the perspective of a less-than-elite team. I'll probably edit them in once I get some fucking sleep.

This tournament made me feel glad we brought a staffer (Lauren) along, aside from the fact that this was a good opportunity to play against teams we don't normally face until nationals. Our matches between the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast powers were at the very least entertaining, even if the questions were subpar.

Otherwise, this was, despite my rather low expectations, not a fun tournament, and had it not been for free housing, I would likely have asked for our money back.

Jasper LeeUniversity of TennesseeThe Ohio State University '14Solon High School '10